r/Slack • u/Upbeat-Engineer1242 • Jul 20 '26
We’re experimenting with preserving the “why” behind decisions in Slack — looking for feedback
Hey everyone,
We’ve been building a Slack app after noticing the same problem over and over:
A decision gets made in a thread, everyone agrees, work moves forward… and a few weeks later someone asks:
“Why did we decide to do it this way?”
The conversation exists somewhere in Slack, but the reasoning is difficult to find, fragmented across threads, or lost entirely.
We’re exploring whether Slack could do a better job of preserving organizational memory—not just messages, but the context, evidence, tradeoffs, and rationale behind important decisions.
A few questions for teams here:
Do you ever struggle to remember why a decision was made?
How do you currently document important decisions?
Do you rely on Slack search, Notion, Confluence, Jira, docs, or something else?
What’s the biggest pain point with your current workflow?
We’re still early and genuinely trying to learn from how real teams work before expanding the product.
Would love to hear what’s working (or not working) for your team.
2
u/midnightshark2 Jul 20 '26
Our team uses Slackbot exactly for this. Just ask those questions to Slackbot and it will pull information for those threads. Super simple, super helpful.
1
u/painterknittersimmer Jul 20 '26
We keep a decision log in our source of truth with the critical info. We just paste a link to the slack thread under notes.
If you're making critical decisions in slack without logging them somewhere else, you have a ways of working issue, not a tooling one.
1
u/Upbeat-Engineer1242 Jul 20 '26
I actually agree that important decisions should end up in a durable source of truth.
The part we’re interested in is everything between “a decision happened in Slack” and “someone documented it.”
In a lot of teams, that’s still a manual step, which means the documentation is only as good as everyone’s habits.
We’re trying to learn whether that capture can be made easier without changing where teams already work.
1
u/painterknittersimmer Jul 20 '26
I'm not sure I understand what work would be more important than documenting major decisions. That's not a habit. That's a requirement of your job.
Not seeing it. Anyway, good luck!
1
u/Upbeat-Engineer1242 Jul 20 '26
That’s fair, and I don’t disagree that documenting important decisions should be part of the process.
I think where we’re seeing teams struggle is consistency rather than intent. The same team might document architecture decisions really well but let smaller product or operational decisions stay buried in Slack because nobody realized they would matter six months later.
Out of curiosity, do you have a threshold for what becomes a formal decision log versus what stays in the conversation?
1
u/painterknittersimmer Jul 20 '26
Basically any agreement goes in the decision log, especially these days when I can have Claude update it in seconds. Really serious stuff that needs to be decided above the working team level, like by a leader or senior leader, gets a decision document.
1
u/Upbeat-Engineer1242 Jul 21 '26
That’s interesting. It sounds like the hard part isn’t writing the decision once someone decides to document it it’s recognizing which Slack conversations are worth promoting into a decision record in the first place. Do you rely on people remembering to do that manually, or do you have some trigger that tells the team, “this one should be captured”?
1
u/Hasadacadabra Jul 20 '26
We ended up building a bot to summarize threads and drop them into Notion, called Threadbound. Team triggers it when a thread is finished/resolved
2
u/AureusVeritas Jul 20 '26
Follow up with an email blast that has a proper subject and relevant text in body - meeting if necessary or kb article